Tuesday, January 01, 2008

(I walk along the tram tracks on Flinders Street, because I can. The sun is gone, and didn’t take the heat with it. People everywhere, so many I can’t see the faces any more, just people people people. I get home later than usual, strip all clothes, pour a large drink, sit down, and start editing this, this tirade. this manifesto, this recap.)

(Don’t start listening to emo bands though. There’s only so much dignity you can strip before it isn’t funny anymore.)

(Wait, what am I listening to now? 65DaysOfStatic? Haha, PSYKE! THERE IS NO HOPE FOR ME. We shall retract that statement. You may listen to any music you like, provided it’s good music.)

Let's talk about 2006. You need to remember 2006 before you can understand 2007.

2006 was a good year. Nothing bad happened. At all. It was smooth sailing, punctuated by a fantastic trip overseas containing mountains and hilarious friends. You were financially secure, well clear of unemployment and no one’s financial burden, lived in a good sound home and possessed all your teeth. The perfect year to get your act together, and little girl, you tried. Every. Single. Fucking. Day. You pushed yourself to be happy, bright, cheery. You looked for little joys to bolster up your days. You beat yourself senseless for falling in a slump and dragged yourself back out. You sought and found wonder in everything, even when there was no wonder to be found. You made up more reasons than you’d ever need as proof that you should be grateful to be alive. You did everything you could to be the person you wished you were.

At the end of this easy, good, smooth, unchallenging year, you looked back, and realised that despite all your efforts and a distinct lack of any real obstacles, you were only ever 'okay'. Look at that. 'Okay.' One of the worst words in the English language.

And you were exhausted. Fighting yourself everyday does that.

(This sounds distinctly like whinging. Are you whinging? “Oooh, I had a good year, POOR ME.” Insert my total lack of sympathy here.)

(And don’t give me that crap about how you only ever have the life you live, and your misery can only really be compared to your previous states of misery. That’s justifying feeling sorry for yourself, and a lousy justification at that.)

(Oh shut up. I was there too.)

The few people you tried to relate this to missed the point. They congratulated you on how strong you were, without realising this so called ‘strength’ was driving you face first into the ground. (“OH I’M SO MISUNDERSTOOD WAAAAA.”) Oh, but you’re not strong, you never were, you’re just good fooling the people around you (…or not). Even better at fooling yourself. (OR NOT. I WAS THERE TOO.) You’d convinced yourself that you would not fall apart, and then couldn’t fall apart when you needed to. Quite frankly, the thought of being strong made you sick. The thought of carrying on this ridiculous fight every day for the rest of your life made you sick. The thought of all this effort just to be 'okay' made you sick. Sick, sick, sick.

(Well, that bit’s true. I’ll give you that. You’re still being a bit dramatic though.)

(Oh well, at least you’re now quoting Patrick Wolf. You’re still being emo about it though.)

The first couple of months were spent in deadpan panic. What to do. Continue the fight, every year, month, day, hour, minute, second stretching into second for the rest of your life? Fuck that horseshit. (Damn straight.) Get help? Stupid, stubborn, wilful, mulish little girl. You’ve never asked for help, you’ll never ask for help. (Damn straight.) Counselling? Not your cup of tea – you’ve already mastered the art of self-manipulation and single-player mind games. (Damn straight.) What’s left? It's quite easy to spend a couple of months brooding over crap like this. You’re a worldclass champion brooder, you are. You could out-brood Hamlet. (Damn straight.)

a darker day has hold at last

Oh, but there are always new single-player mind games to try on yourself, and you found this one by accident. (Your tone here is getting a bit…er…ridiculous. “Oh”, what do you mean, “Oh”?) Reading about space, planets and stars, generally clicking around wikipedia in the long hours of nightshift, researching this novel you know will never go anywhere, you fixate on the size of the universe, on the span of time, and it reminds you of mountains.

deep in a dream i

In grade 1 you had this moment: sitting at your table, looking out the window, thinking about the solar system. It was overcast. Elbow on the table, chin in hand. You were going through a space phase, like little boys do. You weren’t listening to the teacher. You were thinking of the distance between each planet, the time it takes for the light of the sun to reach them, and for an instant, you held that distance in your mind. It’s enormous, too big to hold for any longer than an instant, and you let it go quickly. It frightened you. In that great span, you saw how small you were, and how irrelevant everything around you was. You were 6 years old. You let the teacher’s voice in your head then, and she filled that vast space, but you never forgot.

(This is true, but irrelevant.)

set the compass

(Doggamn with the lyrics! NEVER AGAIN.)

You remember that feeling, twenty years later, and this time, you don’t let it go. The people who study astronomy, the immensity of space, the agonisingly slow tick of a geological time frame, you wonder why it is these people do not simply lay down and die, and how they keep the size of what they stare into from overwhelming them. You let it overwhelm you. You see yourself as nothing . You are nothing. You, the city you live in, the people around you, the history that follows you, everything is entirely irrelevant. There’s no point to anything. Nothing matters at all.

(Melodrama much? You should write romances. You’d be ACE.)

It doesn't matter if you’re a miserable fucker. Your state of mind doesn't matter at all.

(DAMN STRAIGHT. NOW GET OVER YOURSELF.)

to spinning

So, you stop fighting.

You stop looking after yourself, stop protecting yourself from your triggers. If you see trouble ahead, (and boy, did you see trouble) you no longer make any effort to steer clear of it, and keep going. Speeding cars and concrete walls. (Actually, I believe the correct term is FACEPLANT.)

Oh, you haven’t faceplanted (Heh, see?) this much since high school! You daft muppet. (Are you talking to yourself? Did you just call me a muppet? Whatever, wiener.) You let a boy in your head, you let him lean on you because he says flattering things and tells you secrets, and you, you’re a greedy, desperate little thing. A sniff of trust and you’ll roll over like a good dog. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter, that you don’t need proof you’re worth trust. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter if you do.

You tell yourself it doesn’t matter if you let him trample your heart.

You tell yourself it doesn’t matter if you let him do it again, and again. It isn’t as though you have anything better to do.

You let him use you like a toy, and like a toy, he gets bored and finds something else to play with. (Holy crap, no one wants to hear about your weird little infatuations. Not even I do, and I was there. Particularly because I was there, actually. Ew. Embarassing.) You tell yourself it didn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. But you’ve spent years trying to avoid these sorts of messes, and the behaviour patterns that have carried you this far don’t break easily.

What a mess. What a lot of crying in the dark. What an awful lot of tissues. This year, mucous production is up ten fold from all previous years. Ew. (+10 Ditto)

This is how you learn. In those small wretched lonely hours when you’re afraid someone will hear you snivelling, you realise that this misery is, all things considered, easy. It doesn’t matter if you’re miserable, so you’re not telling yourself you shouldn’t be miserable, and my goodness, doesn’t that make all the difference? You’re miserable and (word repetition, muppet) upset and depressed, and you let yourself be just that. What a relief, to be a mess and not beat yourself up about it. It goes away faster, because it doesn’t matter, and you come out the end thinking, well, that wasn’t so bad.

Then you find the catch to letting yourself be miserable when you’re miserable is that-

-you have to let yourself be happy when you’re happy.

Which is harder than you expect.

(Trufax.)

But you’re a fast learner.

(Don’t flatter yourself.)

And you find that doesn’t matter so much either. All that self-loathing doesn’t matter. All the good memories don’t matter. All these ups and downs and difficulties and surprise joys, they don’t matter. Which starts you doing things you wouldn’t normally do, because, well, whatever happens, it doesn’t matter, does it?

(Yeah…well…)

You get a little addicted to new things and risks and you seek out experiences and scars and anything with an ending you can’t see. Why not? It doesn’t matter. Might as well see what happens. You never know, there might be elephants.

(I have to reveal that, sadly, there was a distinct lack of elephants to the year. I know, it’s appalling. Look what the world has come to; mediocre wank with no elephants. Hemlock and crushed glass, I say!)

Another boy happens. You expect it to be a mess, and it is. (Admittedly, not as messy as you expected.) You’ve no idea what’s going on, and you’re a little weirded out to find that’s okay by you. (Haha, do you actually believe that? Is that the sound of self-delusion? I think it is!) Doesn’t matter.

The family divides, again. Your father goes to Malaysia, and over the phone you hear him wilting and tired and at war with the family. Most of the time, he doesn’t say anything. Sometimes he drowns you with everything that’s going on, and hangs up in tears. Does matter.

The first boy pops up now and then, and you eyeball him, and fail to get hung up on him, which is very out of character. You’re impressed. Doesn’t matter. (Actually, I’m impressed too. What’s up with that? Why aren’t you all clingy and mopey and, what is it Helen of Troy does? She pines around the topless towers or something.)

(Well, he did treat you like shit.)

(You could at least get hung up about that.)

(Okay, fine, whatever. Be all reasonable and rational and shit. See if I care.)

You go on a ridiculously long and convoluted trip to Japan, (which rocked the muthafucking kazbar) where all these budding thought paths and behaviour patterns get a thorough work out. Every day, you confront something you’re not familiar with, and you find you love winging your way through it all, bemusing as it is. You conquer that country, and in doing so, conquer yourself.

(That sounds like bull. ‘Conquering’? Oh please. So several years ago.)

Maybe you even come back changed.

(AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAaaaaa…ah shit, you made me cry with that one. That’s fucking hilarious.)

Doesn’t matter.

You stop talking about it and go ahead and apply for a lease while in the middle of nightshift. You’re no fool. You might be changed, but not that much. It takes a nightshift-induced lunacy to make things happen, and while you’re lying on the floor in the upstairs bedroom in Malaysia, things happen. (You did show some sense there. Well played, that man.)

You loose your certainty. Things matters, things don’t matter, you loose your grip on what is right/wrong, good/bad, polite/impolite, heartless/honest, true/false, real/not. You’ve been down this slippery slope before, and you don’t like it, and this, this does matter. (Yes, yes it does. We are of one mind on that.) You fight, then, and regain some measure of certainty. Still, the world is a little less in focus, and you have these moments, more and more of them, in which you find yourself looking for a sign of the impossible, something to indicate everything that everyone assumes is a certainty is an elaborate farce. This matters, but, less and less. (You get used to it. After a while. Still, it isn’t nice. I think we’ll need to do something about it soon.)

You make the conscious decision to leave your safety net. You know, just to see what happens. You move into a white box in an old tower with a view of an airconditioning vent and pigeons. Your mother isn’t there. Your father isn’t there. Your brother isn’t there. Your dogs aren’t there. You fear loneliness, which leads to depression, which will lead to you isolating yourself, which will lead to deeper loneliness, which will lead to- (Look at those drama llamas run! Run, drama llama, run!)

You surprise yourself a bit. The teething problems aren’t nearly as big as you expected. You take to this white box like a fish to water. Maybe shiftwork kept you away from people more than you realised. Being alone has never troubled you, and it isn’t troubling you now. (Nah, you just had yourself convinced, for a little while, that you were a people person. You’re not. No surprise there.)

You let yourself be friends with people you like. People you like so much they make you shy. They’re hilarious, ridiculous, frustrating, fascinating people. The worst thing they do is laugh at you. The best thing they do is laugh at you. They tell you you’re fabulous, and it doesn’t matter if every now and then you believe it. (Fah. No one cares unless you’re going to name names. Are you? Didn’t think so. Too much doubt that you’re wrong, and they’ll see their name here and be slightly creeped out that it means more to you than it does to them. You talk big about everything not mattering, but you’re not 100% sold on your own mad theory. You’re definitely not fabulous, but you can be amusing at times. At some point, probably sooner than later, you’re going to revert, and they’ll think you’ve just gone and snobbed them all off, and dislike you immensely for it. Eh. It happens. You’ll live survive.)

You nearly turn into an arsehole. (AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Fuck me, ‘nearly’, did you say ‘nearly’? How about, YOU ARE AN ARSEHOLE. REVEL IN YOUR ARSEHOLEOSITY. BE AT ONE WITH YOUR ARSEHOLE- no, wait, that came out wrong.) It’s easy to throw ‘doesn’t matter’ around. You draw lines; it doesn’t matter what happens to you, but other people, they still matter. It’s doubtful anyone around you is seeking out all the unexplored places on the map, all the here be dragons, as you are. (Wank.) No one else has carefully nurtured a space-induced irrelevance complex. (This is probably true, and probably a good thing.) They matter, to them. Respect that, at least. You’re not entirely sure where all of these lines are, but you suspect you’ll know them when you cross them. You suspect you’re still an arsehole, regardless. (Oh, I know you are.) Doesn’t matter. Sometimes.

You say more. You reach out randomly – why not? – and people say things back! (No. Fucking. Shit.) NO WAI. (Wait, let me underline that.) You collect an enormous number of conversations, and more secrets than you know what to do with. You wonder if this is normal, this large pile of secrets you have, from all manner of people. You imagine keeping them under the bed. The real estate agent comes around for inspection, and screams at the sight of them. What are they, she cries. Oh them, you wave dismissively, they’re just secrets. But they’re staining the carpet! They’re secrets, you repeat, they come out with time. (Okay, I admit I like this piece of wank. It can stay.)

(Just between you, me, and anyone else who has read this far, this isn’t a behaviour pattern that’s going away any time soon. You consider the gift of a secret the greatest compliment you’ll ever receive. They make your ego puff up bigger than it has any call to be. It’s shallow and desperate, this need to be acknowledged as worthy of trust. But you like other people’s secrets. Maybe because they overshadow your own.)

(Where’d that set of brackets come from? True and irrelevant.)

You don’t hold onto the little acknowledgements of your worthlessness as much. This is a good thing. You don’t hold onto the little proofs of your worth as much. This is a better thing. Always thought that was a little pathetic. Neither of these things matter. (+10 Ditto.)

You have a secret. You didn’t know you had it until you tried to let it out. You can’t decide if this matters or not. (Blah, blah blah…)

Probably not. (DAMN STRAIGHT.)

You’re here now, and this is no longer addressed to the second person, but written in first person. Here I am. I am here. Funny old year.

(That is one butt ugly paragraph. Dude, you suck.)

(Also, not ‘funny old year’. Great year. A year with messes and pitfalls and bruises, and yet you made no mistakes. Ridiculous stupid ludicrous dumb incredible hilarious year. That was fun, again, again!)

Used to be, I placed great stock in knowing who I was. I might be a useless horrible worthless sack of shit, but at least I knew who I was. Maybe that was the problem all along.

Now, I don’t know who I am. Things happen, and my reactions are unexpected. My mind works differently, and I keep surprising myself. Some of these surprises are hilarious. Some of them unflattering. I keep looking for something new, something that will push me in a different direction, something to draw out another unfamiliar reaction. I like this unknown thing I’ve become. Let’s see what happens.

Used to be, I was going to change the world. Conquer it, even. (Yep. Sooo several years ago.) Never even doubted it. Oh, my arrogance can topple towers. It could wreak more destruction than Godzilla.

Now, I’m rather more interested in how the world can change me. Augh, I’m so self-absorbed, I find my own personality shifts fascinating. Heh. Lame. I’m easily amused. And you ask me why I don’t need a television. (About time you started mocking yourself.)

Used to be, I’d consider all this entirely self-destructive.

Now, doesn’t matter. Haha, how’d you like them apples? I’m not writing stories, so I might as well make a story out of my life. At this rate, it will be long, badly written, unbalanced, and with an unreliable narrator. (LIKE YOUR BLOG POSTS?) A narrator who keeps going on about how she doesn’t mean a thing. If I don’t mean a thing, then anything I go through means nothing as well, and I might as well just take that freedom and run with it. Oh, logic traps. Oh, mind games. I loose every time. Don’t know if any of this is healthy, but it’s a hell of a lot more interesting.

But this can’t last. Rubber bands, when stretched out, snap back into shape. Usually with some force. I’m winging it, every day, and I love it, and it can’t last. I can feel it, some old me, a Tessa who couldn’t stand the thought of not being in control, a Tessa who let her insecurities matter, a Tessa who couldn’t have done any of this, she hasn’t gone away. She never went far at all. It’s building up, and soon the fight will start all over again. I’m afraid. It shouldn’t matter. It does.

(Silly little girl. You’re forgetting what started this all. You’re “okay”. Doesn’t matter what you go through, you’ll always, always, fucking always be okay. One of the worst goddamn muthfucking goatsucking words in the whorish English language.)

(Admittedly, before you get to be “okay”, you have to go through the nasty stuff first.)

(But you will be okay.)

(Eventually.)

(Ugh. I’m not even convincing myself.)

To you, the future me who might read this again a month from now, a year from now, remember; you don’t mean a thing. You are irrelevant. You don’t matter.

(I rather think any future Tessa reading this is going to snort, like this *snoooort* and find this disgusting mess of blather both amusing and humiliating.)

There’s no point to anything. The dinosaurs don’t matter. Hitler doesn’t matter. The death of the sun doesn’t matter. Clearance sales don’t matter. The change of government doesn’t matter. Your shift penalties don’t matter. That he didn’t reply doesn’t matter. The depletion of the ocean’s tuna stocks don’t matter. That she doesn’t and has never listened doesn’t matter. The guy who flirted with you in the store doesn’t matter. The secrets you keep don’t matter. Your blisters don’t matter. You sleep doesn’t matter. Your dreams don’t matter.

(Oh for- you know this mind game isn’t going to last much longer. It’s too hard walking the line between pure apathy and reckless, harmful stupidity. This mind game is ending. You felt it, I can feel it. The battle has started, you can see it in this post. How many Tessas are there in here? Never been single minded about anything. I had to ridicule myself before I could consider posting this, because I can only take myself seriously if I’m not taking myself seriously at all. What’s the point, if you can’t laugh at it? It’s all coming down, and one day I’m going to wake up in my usual, old frame of mind, trapped in my head and unable to deal with anything, and I’ll be alone in a white room. I don’t see myself coping with this. At all.)

'Twas brillig... but that's as far as I get, for my thought-arteries have hardened in a way where my mind can't quite follow the many yous which showed up there - can't quite grasp what things might feel like, much though they were once familiar. (For what it's worth, though, I'll keep on trying.) *hugs all of the yous*

Regardless, I'm hoping 2008 will feature many mountains.

Mountains good.

*nods*

(Related to that, I should give advance warning that I'll be in the neighbourhood again come July, on account of doing my own mountain-hunting.)

I mean there, Melbourne. I missed Kosciuszko last time I came through, so I figure I should rectify that and afterward Melbourne definitely deserves a couple of days of sitting down to relax and catch up with friends.Though I'm also going to hunt mountains in other places both likely and unlikely, to wit: Peru, Easter Island, Tahiti, New Zealand (at least one week in Lake Tekapo) and Thailand. (I have good hopes about the ones on Tahiti: small islands mean they should be easy to corner.) ^_^